Meeting Name: Committee on Forestry (COFO) (16th Session)
Meeting symbol/code: COFO 2003/6

The First International Workshop on Community Forestry in Africa was held in the Gambia in February 1999. It began the process of bringing together all of the African experiences in community-based natural resource management. Until the Gambia workshop, those looking for documentation of existing initiatives would have looked towards Asia for information about best practices and experience in participatory forest management.

In the first part of this paper the role of the core principles in three different scenarios will be discussed. The first is a setting where a shared watercourse, but no specific treaty exists; the second, where a treaty is in the process of being negotiated; and the third where an agreement over the shared resource is in force. The second par t of the paper will look in detail at the normative content of each principle, its reflection in specific watercourse agreements and its implementation by joint bodies.

These Regulations, made in terms of section 45 of the Communal Land Reform Act, provide with respect to a wide variety of matters concerning communal land and communal land rights. Part I deals with (application for) customary land rights. It specifies the maximum size of land that may be held under customary land right and specifies particulars pertaining to allocation of customary land right.

Towards a Common Platform on Access to Land has evolved through an extensive process of global consultation that was launched in 2000 at the eighth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. It aims to stimulate and support public policies and country-level activities that improve access by the poor to land and productive requirements in order to improve their production and household incomes. Its global scope means that it can gather and disseminate knowledge and lessons learned from and to different countries and regions.

Forests and pastoralism are in a state of crisis in the Borana lowlands in southern Ethiopia. State management has failed to control forest exploitation and past and present development interventions continue to undermine pastoral production systems. In this paper the authors aim to show how a fundamental misunderstanding of pastoral land management, and in particular pastoral tenure systems, has undermined traditional institutions and the environment for which they were once responsible.

The government of Uganda is currently decentralizing many of its services including those directly related to agriculture and the environment. Non-government organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) are being asked to take the lead in the provision of government services such as agricultural extension during the transition to demand driven fee-for-service. This paper explores the role of government programs, NGOs and CBOs in the adoption of land management technologies.

Governments and scientists have long regarded the pastoralists’ way of life as a cause of environmental degradation. This belief is rooted in a misunderstanding of the pastoralist way of life and is reflected in national policies on land tenure and resource access in Kenya. The area of land controlled by pastoralists has been steadily reduced, and pastoralists have been encouraged to give up their nomadic way of life and settle, leading to conflict between pastoralist groups and other land users and damage to the environment.

What does community based natural resource management (CBNRM) mean for Mozambique's poor?Through the case study of Derre Forest Reserve in Zambezia province, this paper explores the theory and practice of CBNRM, an approach which has been widely promoted in southern Africa, and is central to elements of the Mozambican forestry and wildlife policy of 1999.The paper examines the history of community involvement in forest use in the reserve, and the changing nature of local organisations.

This report identifies the links among economic growth, poverty alleviation, and natural resource degradation in Brazil. It examines the effects of (1) a major devaluation of the Brazilian real (R$); (2) improvements of infrastructure in the Amazon to link it with the rest of Brazil and bordering countries; (3) modification of land tenure regimes in the Amazon agricultural frontier; (4) adoption of technological change in agriculture both inside and outside the Amazon; and (5) fiscal mechanisms to reduce deforestation." -- from Author's Abstract

Assessing the impact of integrated natural resource management (INRM) research poses a challenge to scientists. The complexity of INRM interventions requires a more holistic approach to impact assessment, beyond the plot and farm levels and beyond traditional analysis of economic returns. Impact assessment for INRM combines the traditional "what" and "where" factors of economic and environmental priorities with newer "who" and "how" aspects of social actors and institutions. This paper presents an analytical framework and methodology for assessing the impact of INRM.